Re: GTK+ Portability

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Brad House <brad mainstreetsoftworks com> writes: 
> Yeah, I think most started, then dropped it, especially because
> of the poor condition of libtool,etc on OS X...

Yep, fixing anything necessary from autotools to GTK will be a
requirement of the project.
 
> What exactly does Glib do? Not really familiar with it's workings...

"Utility library and portability layer" - just look over the docs, 
you'll get the idea.

> Also, I was thinking of starting with 1.2 series of GTK ...  it's
> currently what I'm most familiar with, and don't want to get into
> the whole PANGO thing right yet (I don't think it will be terribly
> hard to port to 1.3.x (2.0) in the future)

Not a good idea; 1.2.x is not set up to have multiple backends, and
yes porting to 1.3.x would be a huge job. Also, the OS X port is
essentially useless unless it's merged into GTK proper in CVS, and
that will not happen for 1.2.x. Finally, 1.3.x is just worlds better
than 1.2.x, and it's what you want to use for any apps you intend to
write.
 
> Yeah, small steps for now, that is if I decide it's worth tackling this.
> The only reason I'm considering it is that I've got to port a GTK
> application over to OS X, and I was thinking it would probably be
> just as hard to port GTK itself over... So what the heck, but I'll
> have to get my hands a little bit dirty to make that decision.

If your app is pretty big, that may well be true. If it's just a small
app, probably the easiest step is to break out the backend code and
have multiple native frontends.

Havoc